Professionalism: The Golden Years

This paper presents a detailed exposition of professionalism, carefully situated within the social, theoretical, and temporal context of the decades immediately following World War II. This classic conception of professionalism involves three attributes-knowledge, organization, and the ethic of professional service. Such an approach presumes a functionalist view of society specific to the middle years of the Twentieth Century, a time characterized by a high degree of occupational specialization, shared norms and values, stability, and the tendency to maintain equilibrium in the presence of social change. A clear picture of this classic view of professionalism is the first step toward understanding the contemporary meaning of professionalism for today's engineering education and practice issues.